Famed music producer Brian Eno says Trump puts an end to decline

English music producer and composer, Brian Eno, who has been associated for decades with artists such as David Bowie and Roxy Music, has been involved in leftist politics since the 1980s. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper of the UK, he said that the election of Donald Trump shows that members of the political elites, like himself, were unaware of that there was a “revolution brewing.” He said that groups such as the UK Independence Party and the National Front, both of which supported the referendum to separate the country from the EU (Brexit) in the United Kingdom, were thought to be in a “little bubble.” To the contrary, it was the elites who were in “the bubble.”

Speaking in a Guardian interview, Eno said,”‘F***, it was us, we were in the bubble, we didn’t notice it.’ There was a revolution brewing and we didn’t spot it because we didn’t make it. We expected we were going to be the revolution.”

Eno has been associated with the Liberal Democrat party of the UK and with the pro-Palestine cause, in addition to prominent leftists such as Noam Chomsky and Nick Clegg.

Eno (68) said that the US and UK have been in a decline since the time of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, while he also blamed what he called “the Ayn Rand infection” that “spread through the political class.”

Eno spelled out for the interviewer with a graph to show how productivity and real wages rose together until 1975. Since then, he said that real wages have fallen while productivity has increased. He decried extremes of wealth and poverty, saying that there are “62 people worth the amount of the bottom three and half billion people are worth.” Eno is himself a millionaire but does not consider himself a member of the one percent.

As for Brexit and the advent of the Trump administration, Eno said he is an optimist. While most people he knows felt that 2016 was the beginning of a decline that was accompanied by Brexit, Trump’s election and the rise of European nationalism, Eno said, “It looked like things were going to get worse and worse. I said: ‘Well, what about thinking about it in a different way?’ Actually, it’s the end of a long decline.”

Eno added that he is pleased by Trump’s election and Brexit, saying that it is an unexpected "kick in the arse" that was needed “because we weren’t going to change anything.” If Hillary Clinton had won, Eno said, things would have been “business as usual” along with the whole structure she had inherited and the “whole Clinton family myth.”

That future, which was “grinding slowly to a halt,” is not one that he wants, said Eno. He concluded that with Trump, “...there’s a chance of a proper crash, and a chance to really rethink.”